


ever upward

by Shorty



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: ALSO theres some blue/gansey but not enough to tag it, Cabeswater - Freeform, Fluff, M/M, basically one giant spoiler, basically this is me venting my feelings about trk, not much of the orphan girl, post-trk, tons of trk spoilers!!!!!!!! beware
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 00:20:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6681937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shorty/pseuds/Shorty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan dreams a new Cabeswater.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ever upward

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally going to be part of a larger fic, but then i realized this kinda stood out on its own and also made up most of the word count lol. we'll see if i actually write the other fic now. also i have trouble writing in pov's that arent adams.  
> if u wanna come talk about trk with me hmu on [tumblr](http://www.shbsaylor.tumblr.com). we can sob together.

Ronan dreams a new Cabeswater. Adam does not feel it being dreamt.

He is at his parents trailer, or driving down the road through Henrietta, back to the barns, when it is done. He does not know exactly when and where he is when Ronan starts dreaming. Gansey, Blue, Henry - they are all somewhere else, in a field filled with white mitsubishis and one orange camaro. Noah and Aurora Lynch are gone. Adam Parrish is driving along a road, wistful.

He is not wistful for what he is driving away from (never), or what he is driving towards (once - he used to be, can remember the wonder of what he would be if he had grown up in the Barns, with parents who weren’t perfect but still loved him, with brothers, with open fields and animals and magic, but he wasn’t anymore). He was wistful for Cabeswater, in a way he hadn’t been in weeks.

(Maybe this was when Cabeswater started to be dreamt into reality. Maybe the ties Adam had to it that were cut off when Gansey was brought back still lingered, softly pulling at him, bringing the thought of the forest to his mind as it began to once again form.)

(Maybe it was simply wistfulness at how much had changed, brought forth from graduation earlier in the day, and all the change had come from Cabeswater.)

(Maybe it was the guilt kind of wistful - guilty that his thought as Cabeswater faded away and Gansey woke up had been how without the forest he was no longer _Adam the magician_ , just _Adam_.)

(Maybe.)

He gets back to the Barns, parks Ronan’s borrowed car (borrowed for the graduation Ronan didn’t go to) behind his beat up but owned car. He goes into the house, the BMW keys in his hand. He’s spent a lot of time here in Ronan’s childhood home, because it is no longer only Ronan’s childhood home. Ronan still has his room at Monmouth, but he spends more and more time here at the Barns, where Opal can be safe from prying eyes, where Chainsaw can fly around and not look out of place.

Where the sleeping animals left over from his fathers death still lie.

Opal is sitting on the couch, chewing at the tv remote as the channels switch back and forth from her gnawing. 

“Don’t do that,” Adam tells her. She stops and looks at him, eyes peeking out from below her hat.

“He’s sleeping.” She says, but does not go back to her gnawing. “He’s bringing it back.”

(Adam’s not entirely sure what to make of Opal. At times she almost seems like a normal, Ronan-like little girl, if you look past her hooves. She seems to like him - his watch is back on her arm now, even more chewed at then before - as all things Ronan dreams seem to like him. He likes her, as he likes all things Ronan cares about. But he does not know what to make of her.)

He drops Ronan’s keys on the counter, out of the way of where Opal could get to them and stick them in her mouth, and goes up to Ronan’s room. Sure enough, in it, Ronan lies still on his bed.

But not the stillness that comes with sleep. The stillness that comes when he wakes up having brought something back. Only there is nothing around him that was not there before - plenty of dreamt up baubles, but nothing new.

Adam lies down on the bed next to him. He’s still wearing the clothes he worse to graduation, and he can practically feel them wrinkle as he lies there. He’s not sure when Ronan woke up, but it takes him a bit longer past Adam’s arrival for him to start to move.

“You brought it back.” Adam says. He is not sure how he knows what the ‘it’ Opal said was the ‘it’ he spoke of, but he did. It was not a feeling or a link to the forest. It was just a knowing. A knowing that Ronan brought it to life, woke it up, the first time. A knowing that he could do it again.

Ronan smiles - he smiles more now, and not just the sly grin or the smirk, and not just in moments of forgetting to keep up his posturing. It is the smile that used to only come when he was around Matthew. It is better than the smile that used to only come when he was around Matthew. “And I made it better.”

Adam smiles back - he smiles brighter now, now that he’s been accepted into an Ivy League college with most of the tuition payed for through scholarships, now that he knows over the summer he’ll only have to work two jobs and in the school year he’ll only have to work one, now that Gansey is alive and Blue’s curse is gone and Ronan smiles at him daily. “Gansey’ll be happy.”

Ronan leans into him.

“Gansey will be fucking jubilant. He’ll probably piss himself. He’ll probably make us trek through the whole thing as soon as he find out.”

They do not tell Gansey or anyone else for hours. They have other(better) things to do.

…..

Gansey does not piss himself. But he does get the look in his eyes that they all knew too well, and he does lead them to the newly formed Cabeswater with an _excelsior_ on his lips. It feels like old times. But there is no weight of Gansey’s impending death on Adam’s shoulders, no pressure to find a sleeping (dead, dusty, skeletal) king that has been missing for centuries. There is just the five of them, even if there should be six, talking about nothing but doing it in the best way possible, and a magical forest that has been reawakened by his boyfriend for a second time. It feels like old times. It is not.

Adam is not connected to the forest anymore - this is a different Cabeswater than the one he’d promised his eyes and hands to, even if it looks so similar to the old one - but there is still an understanding, a familiarity. He is not sure if it is born of Ronan or born of his cut bond to the old Cabeswater. He is not sure it matters either way.

There is something different about the forest. It feels more alive, even though it had until just recently been as close to dead as a magical forest can get. The trees talk, and somehow they can understand them - “Like the box,” Blue says, and Ronan doesn’t have to answer for them to know that that is what it is.

“It’s safer, too.” Ronan says. He doesn’t say how, doesn’t need to. Cabeswater is safer - not for them, but maybe from them, or maybe from people in general. It is safer for itself, though it still opens itself up to its Greywaren, and to the boy who was once it’s hands and eyes, to the boy who died not once but twice on the ley lines that run through it, to the girl who chose them all. To the boy they chose recently to come with them.

They walk through the forest for hours. It’s maybe not the smart thing to do - time gets lost here, after all - and yet they do it. Gansey and Blue, holding hands and leading the charge. Henry, following behind, a million questions inside of him but none spilling out, comfortable enough in his own skin for once to not feel the need to have jokes and babble filling up the silence. Ronan, who is not holding Adam’s hand but looks like he wants to.

Adam, who walks through the forest with his friends, who slips his hand into the hand of the boy who dreamt it until their fingers are tangled tight.


End file.
